News

Veeam Acquires Partner Kasten in Kubernetes Backup Move

• By Kurt Mackie
• October 06, 2020

In a deal valued at $150 million, cloud data management and backup solutions company Veeam is acquiring its partner Kasten, making the entirety of the Baar, Switzerland-based backup and disaster recovery firm part of Veeam's operations.

As part if the deal announced Tuesday, Kasten will continue to offer its K10 Kubernetes-native data protection solution, but Kasten's solutions also will get integrated into Veeam's Cloud Data Management platform, specifically its Backup & Replication product.

"You can expect to see Kubernetes assets visible and integrated in the Veeam Cloud Data Management Platform," said Danny Allan, Veeam's chief technology officer and senior vice president, in a Tuesday Veeam blog post.

In essence, Baar, Switzerland-based Veeam adds native Kubernetes backup support to it main cloud management product with this deal. The whole Kasten team will be joining Veeam.

The two companies have shared a common approach to industry shifts. Veeam moved toward building native support for virtual machines and cloud-based services, while Kasten saw a need to provide native backup and disaster recovery for the burgeoning Kubernetes container orchestration industry shift.

The combination of Veeam and Kasten will take Veeam "from a one billion company to a two billion company" Allan said in a Veeam-produced video chat with Niraj Tolia, Kasten's CEO and co-founder.

Kasten, based in California and Utah, became a company in January 2017. It bet on Kubernetes, aiming to build a native backup and disaster recovery solution for that container orchestration solution rather than a legacy bolt-on solution. The idea was to embrace DevOps and make things easier for developers.

"Kubernetes, the de facto standard for orchestrating containers, has succeeded because it (rightly) focuses on the application and developers and not infrastructure nor vendors," explained Tolia in a Tuesday blog post. "This seemingly subtle requirement to be application-centric fundamentally impacted everything we built at Kasten including our architecture, UI, API, and workflows. Today, we are proud to have convinced the industry that the concept of application-centric data management is the only reasonable way for Kubernetes users to approach cloud-native backup and recovery."

"With the acquisition of our partner Kasten, we are taking a very important next step to accommodate our customers' shift to container adoption in order to protect Kubernetes-native workloads on-premises and across multi-cloud environments," Allan said, in a released statement.

Veeam plans to continue Kasten's participation in open source community projects with the acquisition, including "the Kubernetes Storage Special Interest Group and the Data Protection Working Group in Kubernetes." Veeam additionally plans to support Kasten's past work with Kanister, an open source Kubernetes data management effort. Veeam will support kopia, as well, another open source tool for managing backups that Kasten helped to develop.